A New Mother and a New Brother

Vickie and my father were married in late spring, which meant that the long humid days of summer were right around the corner. I was excited that Tony and I had made friends with the neighbor kids, Eric Webster, and Joey and Maria Massa, who just happened to have a small clubhouse in their back yard. Looking back, I am fairly certain that whoever built the clubhouse had no intentions of having it used as make out joint for young kids. But Joey and I, and Maria and my brother spent many chilly afternoons sitting on the benches inside the playhouse kissing like grown ups. Joey was handsome with dark brown hair and blue eyes. And I liked to kiss him. But when it was my turn to make out with Eric, I grimaced. His lips were big and he slobbered all over my face.

Sometimes the five of us met in my and Tony’s back yard, which was quite large, and played baseball. But it never mattered what the game was, Tony took the lead. “Me and Joe are captains,” he said; “Chooch, I get you.” I sprinted over to stand behind him. Joe chose Maria. Eric stood there, shifting foot to foot, crooked brown bangs slanted over his eyebrows. I felt sorry for him. “You can be catcher,” Tony said. “We’ll bring you in when we need you.”

Tony got to bat first, of course, and hit a foul ball right over the chain link fence. He hollered, “Home run,” and jogged to first base. “No way,” Joey yelled, chasing him. By the time Tony got to second, Joey tackled him and then the two were rolling around on the grass. Maria stood motionless with her mouth agape. Eric’s eyes darted from Tony to Joey and back again. Tony turned to me, “Help me, you dumb ass.” So, I closed my eyes tight, jumped on Joey’s back, and started wailing on him. Then Eric jumped in and we were throwing punches and slaps. When I stopped long enough to look up, I saw a small brown booger stuck to the space above Eric’s upper lip.

“Ewww,” I yelled, pulling away. “I’m done. I am not touching that booger.”

I grabbed Maria by the hand and we ran into my house. Vickie sat at the kitchen table smoking a Marlboro 100. “Hi,” I said. “I’m getting us a drink.” Vickie smiled and went back to her cigarette.

The year was 1975, when the Vietnam War had finally ended even though I would have been completely unaware. I vaguely remember watching the Nixon trials on Vickie's grandmother's console TV, Tricky Dick's sweaty face and jiggly jowls monopolizing the screen. But, as a kid, of course, current events were not my forte. Plus, it was summer. All I wanted to do was make crafts and hang out with my friends at day camp instead of cleaning my room and getting scolded, when it was done wrong, by Vickie.

I will admit, however, that the marriage to my father had somehow, temporarily, softened Vickie. Living on Halford Street calls to mind fewer punishments than I had endured in the past and would endure in the future. Perhaps the marriage had boosted her feelings of self worth, made her proud to be a "mother" whether or not the kids were inherited. Vickie offered to sew my fairy costume for the Sleeping Beauty play at day camp, let me have Maria over, and bought the family an adorable gray kitten with white paws that we called Mittens.

Vickie had been eating less food than usual, which was hard to notice since she barely ate anyway, but it seemed that all she could stomach was bowls of Quisp cereal, which tasted a lot like Cap’n Crunch. An adamant hater of milk, Vickie started to drink it regularly. She also bought packages of Reese’s peanut butter cups and hid them in the cupboards.

I never really understood the hiding of the chocolate, since neither Tony nor I had a sweet tooth. My father did not like sweets, and went as far as scraping the icing off cinnamon rolls when he bought the small Sara Lee packages wrapped in plastic. So, I suppose my brother and I simply had not developed a taste for sweets. But Vickie loved them.

I was too young to notice that Vickie's sporadic appetite and cravings for sweets were caused by pregnancy. And even now, I have no recollection of her ever sitting Tony or me down to tell us that she was having a baby. I have no idea when I made the realization, but I do remember her growing belly, and the maternity clothes. One was a brown shirt covered with tiny yellow flowers. She looked adorable in it. And I was not the least bit bothered by the fact that Vickie was pregnant, because I was sure she was going to give me a little sister. By the time the baby started to kick, she invited me to press my head against her belly and listen to the gentle thumping.

I did not want another brother because Tony loved to trick and scare me. Of course, I did little to help my case, since I thought the sun rose and set behind him. Tony was the center of my world, and if he would have told me to shoot someone, I would have obeyed without question. One time, we were eating hard boiled eggs at Vickie’s mother’s house with her brother Reggie. As I bit into a yolk, Tony looked at me and said, “You know, the shells are more nutritious. Try one.” I bit into the shell, the sharp points poking the inside of my mouth. Tony and Reggie laughed as blood pooled on my tongue.

Then there was the time Tony invited me into our bedroom to check out the glow-in-the-dark poster of Frankenstein's monster that we found in a box of Frankenberry cereal. First, he clicked on the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and held the poster up to it. After a few moments, he said, “Okay. . . Turn it off.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “You’re going to scare me.”

“No,” he said, “I won’t.”

My stomach stirred as I clicked off the light. The entire room was black except for the electric green Frankenstein head (a sketch of the Boris Karloff version) staring me right in the face.

“See,” Tony said, “isn’t it cool?”

I nodded in the dark, feeling relatively safe. Then, without warning, Tony charged toward me with the poster and yelled, “Raaaaahhh.” I screamed and ran for the door. The knob was stuck, of course, and I struggled to get out. Tony clicked the light back on.

“God,” he said, “you're such a chicken.”

But, few events could compare to the event that I consider the coup de gras. It happened one night when my father and I were watching Benny Hill. I had gotten up to use the bathroom when I noticed that the light was on in the bedroom. I peeked in to find Tony "hanging" from the top bunk with a plastic noose wrapped around his neck. My jaw dropped wide open and I ran into the living room, yelling, “Daddy, Daddy. Tony hung himself.”

My father’s eyes snapped open and he leaped from the couch. We rushed back into the bedroom and found Tony grasping wildly to loosen the noose, his lips pressed together in a flat line. With one swift motion, my father’s curled fist slammed on top of Tony’s head, making a loud thunk. After my father stomped out of the room, Tony’s green eyes met mine. “You dummy,” he said, “my feet were touching the floor.”

There was something comforting and completely dysfunctional about my relationship with my brother. He loved to freak me out, get me to do stupid things, or tell me lies like, “Dad found me in a garbage can,” or “It tastes good when you pour salt and pepper into your soda.” I was at Tony's disposal, his beck-and-call girl. “Chooch, get me this. Chooch, get me that.” And if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted me to do, he called me “Retard,” or punched me. Despite all of this, I wanted nothing more than to please him. Even when we were kids, he had an air of rock star coolness. Charisma. And as long as I was close to him, I felt safe.


As it turned out, Christmas of 1975 was one of our best. Vickie and my father went all out. From the tree farm where they'd bought one of the fattest and tallest trees I had ever seen to the barrage of gifts that appeared in the morning. And because Vickie was getting more pregnant every day, Tony and I were able to trim the tree, string popcorn on long strands of thread, and hang garland on light fixtures and in door jambs. We had learned our lesson about getting up too early and tearing open gifts that did not belong to us, so, on Christmas morning we played cards in our bedroom until Vickie came to get us.

Walking into the living room that Christmas morning was thrilling. The tree looked like it had given birth to a litter of gifts, one entire section of the room filled with brightly colored boxes and bags. Leaning against the wall was an enormous rectangular gift covered in three different kinds of wrapping paper. But Vickie insisted that we first dig through our stockings, whose contents we dumped onto the floor. They were stuffed with LifeSavers books, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, small boxes of Whoppers and Milk Duds, wind-up toys, and chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil.

After we loaded up on candy and chocolate, we went to work on the gifts. Tony got a clock radio. I got a doll with hair I could style with a plastic curling iron and rollers. We both got plastic eggs filled with Silly Putty. Tony got a dozen Matchbox cars. I got Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. We got dress clothes and pajamas and winter coats. And my parents saved the enormous gift for last—an air hockey table that we set up in our kitchen.

Looking back, there was something poignant about this particular Christmas, since it would be the last before the arrival of my new sibling. Nothing could have prepared me for how much my life was about to change, going from being the little sister, the "baby" with nary a care in the world, to an older sister, someone suddenly strapped with unsolicited responsibility.

It was during Christmas vacation that Vickie went to the hospital, and phoned later to say that she had given birth to a boy. “Rats,” I mumbled into the receiver. Life was so freaking unfair. I didn't want a brother. Tony could be such a jerk, and I was certain that a smaller version of him would be no better. But, I kept these feelings to myself and dreaded the day I would have to meet the new baby boy.

All that disappointment vanished when my father brought Vickie and my new brother home. My parents sat me down on the couch and I got to cradle "Jack" in my arms. I looked into his cloudy blue eyes, and smoothed my fingers over his feathery hair. His clenched fists and wrinkled brow brought tears to my eyes. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

The first few days after Vickie had returned home from the hospital, she tiptoed around the house, groaning with each step. When I asked what was wrong, she answered, “It’s my stitches.” I was seven and knew nothing about childbirth. Why would she need stitches? The thought scared me. I had seen kids at school sewn up after injuries to elbows, knees, or fingers. Had they sewn up Vickie "down there?" I imagined her bottom all pink and tender and stitched together like the laces on roller skates.

Later that morning, while I sat on the couch watching Saturday morning cartoons, Vickie asked me to hold Jack while she looked for a receiving blanket. I stared at the tiny person I held and was overwhelmed by feelings I was too young too recognize or name. There was a stirring in my belly as I envisioned letting go and dropping him on the floor. So, I held tighter. I would never let anyone hurt this baby.

After a bit, Vickie took Jack from me, sat in the recliner, and unzipped the top half of her robe. She pulled him close and moved his face to her breast. His small mouth clamped on and his fists held his puckered face. Vickie gazed into his eyes and wore a subtle smile, a look I had never seen when she looked at Tony or me.

For the first time since I'd known her, she seemed completely relaxed, as though she had arrived at a place she had been seeking her entire life. Jack suckled and she stared lovingly at him. A feeling of warmth welled in me, and I was envious. I had no memory of my biological mother, had no idea whether she had nursed me or not, or gazed upon me with that same look of love. All I knew, was that when I had kids, I too, would breastfeed.

Why I haven't been posting

Loyal readers,

All I can say is Auuuuggghh. Lately, work and my personal life have been kicking my literal and proverbial ass. My latest chapter of the Cobbler's Daughter involves the pregnancy of my former stepmother. If I can get to some writing this weekend, I hope to have a blog post up for you soon.

Thank you for sticking by me. It means so much.

Cheers.

Cindy

Ciucio: Corner Girl or College Girl?

Ciucio: Corner Girl or College Girl
Fesso chi fa I figli meglio di lui.
(Stupid and contemptible is he who makes his children better than himself.)
–Italian Proverb

When the Gifted and Talented Program instructor asks my daughter Josefine to wait in the hall, I sense that our meeting will end badly.  It was I, after all, not Mrs. Somers, who recommended that “Josie” test for the GT Program.  I follow Mrs. Somers into a classroom lined with bookshelves, crowded with tables, the walls a collage of colorful posters: Refuel with fruits and vegetables!  Get Caught Reading!  I sit, knees shaking, in a tiny chair at a small round table.  Across from me, Josie’s second-grade teacher Mrs. Cunningham sits with her arms crossed.  Mrs. Somers takes the seat beside me and greets me in that patronizing tone often used by elementary school teachers.  Josie, who is seven, calls this The Barbie Voice. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Hollenbeck,” says Mrs. Somers, reaching for my hand.  “So nice to meet you.”  She is a thick-waisted blonde who wears black eyeliner and several coats of mascara.  She straightens the stack of papers lying before her on the table.

My stomach stirs.  I am nervous for Josie, nervous for me.

Mrs. Somers looks at Mrs. Cunningham, then me.  “Let me begin by saying,” she nods and raises her eyebrows, “that Josie is really smart. . .  She scored very high in every category.”  Mrs. Somers showcases the top sheet of the stack, a page marked with boxes, pyramids and percent signs.
And though I know the test standards are set by the state of Idaho, not Mrs. Somers, I feel I am at her mercy.  “Let me add,” she says, brow furrowed, “that Josie had a very difficult time during the testing.” 

I nod.

“When the tests became more challenging she became visibly upset and anxious.”  Her hands are fists.  “You could just see her getting more and more tense.” 

I imagine Josie in blonde pigtails and a striped shirt, jaw clenched, body shaking.  When she gets nervous, her eyes water and her cheeks turn bright pink. 

Mrs. Cunningham, who wears a cowl neck sweater, stares silently.  She has dingy brown hair pulled on top of her head in a bun and one of her front teeth is gray.   

Mrs. Somers continues: “You’ve got a smart girl there.”  She places the page with the check list for entrance into the GT program in front of her, a paper lined with categories: Academic Achievement, Intellectual IQ, Creativity, Motivation.  Mrs. Somers points to the percentile boxes: 99, 110, 115, and so on.  “Josie needed to score in the 110^th percentile,” she says, “in three out of the four categories in order to qualify.”  She smiles faintly.  “We’ve decided that she will be challenged enough in the regular classroom.”   

My stomach rumbles.  I start to babble.  “But she scored above average on every one of the Idaho state standardized tests .  .  .  In language, math and reading.”  My voice cracks.  “I think it’s important that girls in our society be smart.  When I was a girl I always felt stupid.  I want Josie to know she’s smart.” 

The teachers stare at me dumbfounded. 

My neck and ears burn.  “I want my girls to know they need brains to get through life.” 

Mrs. Somers speaks softly.  “Josie’s going to succeed no matter what.  .  .  Look.  She scored really high on general information.  That’s the part of the test where I ask what the student knows about the world.”  She tilts her head.  “Obviously, she has parents who talk to her and teach her things.”  She leans back in the chair and rests her arms on her belly. 

Common sense.  What I’ve relied on most of my life.  But I want Josie to have book smarts.

“I’m new to the GT program,” Mrs. Somers says.  “I’ve been teaching here for years, but this is my first year in GT.  So, of course, I tested my own daughter.”  She brushes her bangs out of her eyes.  “Wouldn’t you know it?  She only scored in the 97^th percentile.  I was like, aauugh.”  She nudges my knee.  “Every parent thinks her kid is brilliant, huh?”

Mrs. Cunningham looks at me with a half-smile.  “I’ve asked Josie to read books during Choice Time.”  She closes her eyes while she speaks.  “We have a program called Accelerated Reader.  The children read books from the shelves and then take tests.  Josie has done none this month.  .  .  I’ve also asked if she wants to work on science projects during indoor recess.  She says no.”  She stops smiling.  “I cannot force her to do extra work.  She has to want to.” 

Is she telling me that my daughter is lazy?

Mrs. Somers stands, prompting me to do the same.  “Well,” she says, “again.  It was nice to meet you.”  She shakes my hand.  “I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.” 

Mrs. Cunningham does not move from her chair.  The small amount of tolerance I had for dissolves.
Mrs. Somers walks me through the classroom and out to the hallway where Josie sits with her hands folded, the book Mrs. Somers had offered closed on the chair beside her.  Josie’s eyes are wide, her cheeks red. 

Mrs. Somers says, “Well, look how good you’re sitting there.”

I want my daughter to be more than good.  I want her to be accepted.  Better than ordinary.  And I want her to be smart—a future college girl.   

Josie ekes out a smile.  Mrs. Somers disappears into her safe little room with Mrs. Cunningham.      

“Did I get in?” Josie asks.  Her hair is kinked from sleeping in braids the night before, and one section has been twirled into a spiral, a habit she started as a baby.

I sit in the chair beside her.  “The good news is,” I answer, “your teachers say that you’ll be challenged enough in the regular classroom.  That was my main concern.” 

“But did I get in?”  She grimaces.

I shake my head no.

She covers her eyes with her hands.

I start to cry.  “We said we weren’t going to do this.”  I pull her hands away from her face and wrap my arms around her.  No seven-year-old should have to deal with this.  How could I have been so stupid?  To trust a group of strangers to judge my daughter’s intelligence? 

            “Are you upset with me for putting you through this?”

            She shrugs one shoulder.  “I don’t know.”

            I don’t know means yes.  I ask, “What does this mean to you?”

            “I’m smart,” she says, wiping her face.  “Just not smart enough.”    

            “No.”  I grab her shoulders.  A father walks by with his child and looks at us.  I pretend not to notice.  “You are smart enough .  .  .”  But then I’m at a loss of what more to say.  To feel.  Just what is it that I am protesting?     

            I walk Josie out to the playground where other small girls in pigtails and tights play hopscotch.  Josie twirls a lock of hair around her finger.  I kiss and hug her goodbye, turn to shuffle back up the hill to my office in the English department at the university where I am a graduate student and English Composition instructor.  When I arrive at my small space—two windows adorned with tie-dyed linens, a shelf stuffed with textbooks and student papers, poster of John Belushi wearing a sweatshirt that reads College—I sit at my desk to think. 

Every parent wants to do what’s best for his or her child.  But ultimately, is everything we do for us?  Are we merely attempting to make up for the mistakes our parents made?  Trying to heal wounds that have long since scarred over?

Barely an hour after what I call “the GT fiasco,” I think this need for Josie to be accepted had little to do with her.  Was I trying to make up for my own feelings of isolation?  Inferiority?  Trying to reconstruct my past?  I have felt stupid my entire life—the Italian school girl from New York known on the playground for reciting dirty jokes and showing her panties.  The preteen relegated to “retard math” in seventh grade.  The senior in high school stuck in geometry with freshmen and sophomores.  The twenty-year-old navy woman forced into mandatory study sessions during Apprenticeship school.  The community college student who took algebra three times.  The creative writer who still confuses Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. 

            Everyone feels stupid sometimes, but for me it’s as natural as breath.  While I attended a lecture in graduate school in Bellingham, Washington, one of my professors joked, “I know you’re all sitting there thinking, ‘How did I get into this program?  When are they going to discover that I am a fraud?’”  Everyone in the room laughed, but I just knew she was talking about me.  And I was so afraid of being “outed” as a dummy that I toted defensiveness around like a textbook.  One sneering glance from a classmate and I spun a rhetorical argument praising common sense over book smarts.  I defended popular culture and television, assumed that everyone was more well-read than I.  But if I really was so stupid, why had I been accepted into graduate school in the first place?

I know now that my attitude has much to do with growing up in an Italian-American family who defines itself through a steadfast blue collar work ethic.  A family who looks with disdain on the educated, the “elite.”  Just who do those high-falutin’ college graduates think they are?  A family who sees college as leisure, not work.  A family who prefers gossip to discussing politics or current events.  A family I both resist and embrace.        

For the first nine years of my life, the Stilloe side of my family, originally from Naples, called me Chooch—a derivative of the Italian word ciucio.  The story goes like this: when I was a toddler, chubby-cheeked with straight brown hair and brown eyes, I did something careless, perhaps spilled a glass of milk during dinner, or tripped over my shoelaces.  My grandmother called me a ciucio and everyone laughed.  The name stuck.  From then on, I no longer went by Cindy—I was Chooch.

For years, I thought the nickname was a term of endearment, like the French phrase mon petit chou chou (my little cabbage) that I had learned in a Basic Conversational French book I bought at a yard sale.  “Chooch!” my father would call.  “Get me a beer, would ya?”  Or, “Chooch.  Turn down the TV.  Chop-chop.”  As one of thirteen grandchildren, having my own nickname made me feel special, and, I thought, elevated me above my brother and cousins. 

Everyone I knew called me Chooch.  It was the 1970s in Binghamton, New York, and my father owned a shoe-repair and head shop called The Leather Shoe Shop.  During the day, while my brother was at kindergarten, I sat in the back of the shop where my father crafted and dyed all types of leather goods—saddles, purses, hats, belts.  I used small brass tools to stamp my name onto scraps to make key chains: C-h-o-o-c-h. 

Salespeople or friends often stopped by and chatted with me while my father waited on customers or replaced shoe soles using barge cement and a hammer.  Long-haired men with beards wearing T-shirts and bell bottoms, older men in business suits, hair oiled and combed away from clean-shaven faces. 

“Hey, Chooch,” Steve Arvin asked.  He was the ex-boyfriend of my aunt Josephine, for whom my daughter is named.  “What’s going on today?” 

I’d shrug and go back to my leather scraps.

I can still hear the gravely voice of Andy Tierno, the son of an Italian millionaire who had earned his money fixing shoes: “Chooch.  Tell your dad I’ll be back tomorrow, okay, honey?” 

Then I’d go back to stamping the leather.  I loved my nickname.  To me, Chooch sounded Italian.  And I was raised to be proud of my roots, raised to believe that being Italian was the best ethnicity one could be.  My father used to say, “There are two kinds of people in the world: Italians, and those who want to be Italian.”  He’d even asked his girlfriend at the time to paint an Italian flag in the three-foot space above the door jamb at the front of the shop.  My name was Chooch; and all was right in the world. 

Several years later, while I waited to skip rope on the playground at St. Thomas Aquinas, my elementary school, someone called out, “Cindy!   Get in there!” 

I lifted the hem of my plaid jumper and hopped into the swing of the braided rope.  “Call me Chooch,” I said, not missing a beat of Changing Houses.  “That’s my nickname.”  Several kids looked at each other and laughed. 

“Chooch?” Amy Coutant said.  Her pale brown hair was tied back into a ponytail showcasing her freckled face.  She was one of the “smart kids,” and her father was a local judge.  “What does that even mean?” 

I kept jumping but my face flushed.  “I don’t know exactly,” I answered.  “Little cutie or small one.  Something like that.” 

That evening, after dinner, I marched into my father’s den, a spacious room with pumpkin-orange walls, a Playboy Calendar, and a shag carpet in shades of cream and brown.  My father’s hair was black and wavy and he wore glasses.  A Marlboro Red smoldered in the ashtray on his desk.  In front of him lay an open check register. 

When my father saw me, he set down his pen.  I crawled into his lap and kissed him on the cheek.  “Daddy,” I said, “one of my friends at school asked me what Chooch means.  Do you know?” 

He looked at the ceiling for several moments, as if trying to remember, the overhead light reflecting off his lenses.  “Ah,” he said, scratching his chin.  “It’s Italian for.  .  .  jackass.”

I slid off his lap and stood in front of him, my hands balled into fists.  “Jackass?”  I gritted my teeth.  Jackass?  I turned on my heel and stomped into the kitchen.  “No one can ever call me that again.”  My mind shifted to the scene in Pinocchio where the wooden boy, after drinking beer and smoking a cigar, sprouts ears and a tail, and bellows, “Hee-haw!”  That was what my family thought of me? 

I stormed past the sink, the breakfast bar, the telephone on the wall.  Then I walked through the doorway to the hall and yelled, “Ever!”  I stomped up the stairs to my bedroom and shut the door.  A jackass!  I flopped down on my bed and fumed.  All around me hung 8 X 10 posters of hunks from Teen Beat: Scott Baio, the Italian-American who played “Chachi” on Happy Days.  Chachi sounded like Chooch.  I wondered what his name meant. 

Memories crept into my consciousness.  Had I lived up to my nickname?  Was I a ciucio?  I thought of Easter Sunday, when I was seven, during the annual egg hunt at my grandparents’ house, I found the coveted prize, a large goose egg covered with stickers and stars, buried under leaves below the trellis where my grandfather raised grapes for homemade wine.  I grabbed the egg and rested it in my basket, ran to the back yard to show my brother and cousins.  Later, after opening the bag full of prizes—butterscotch candy, a doll with shiny blonde hair, and chocolate bunnies—I cracked open the egg shell and took a bite.  It tasted bitter.

“You don’t eat the goose egg, Chooch,” my cousin Colleen said.  “That’s gross.”

All my other cousins and my brother let out a collective moan.  I blushed.  I had never been known for my brains—I was more known for being able to shove an entire hard-boiled egg into my mouth.  For being able to eat an entire jar of Spanish olives.  For always being last to leave the dinner table.  And for spilling my milk. 

In my grandparents’ house there is a swinging door that separates the dining room from the kitchen.  During holiday meals, we kids sat at a small table with metal chairs in the kitchen, while the adults gathered in the dining room at a large wood table.  Once the meal began, the swinging door stayed closed, not to be opened again until after everyone’s plates of clams and spaghetti, deep-fried scallops and stuffed squid were clean.  While I sat with my brother and cousins, gritty clams scraping my molars, the laughter and muffled gossip on the other side of the door left me curious and seething with jealousy.  I wanted to be with the adults.  To hear their conversations, understand their jokes, be a part of the world behind the swinging door.        
But then I would spill my milk.  One flick of the wrist; and over it went.  The knock of glass against Formica sent my grandmother into the kitchen.  “Jesus Christ,” she would say, dabbing the table in front of me with a wet rag.  A voice would sound from the dining room, “What happened?” to which my grandmother would answer, “Chooch spilled her milk again.”  Then I would start to cry.

But after that evening in fifth grade, no one called me Chooch anymore.  I imagined my father telling his siblings that weekend over full plates of homemade ravioli, Italian bread, cucumbers and tomatoes soaked in vinegar and oil.  Like many families, mine has a tendency to laugh away troubles, make light of any situation.  When my father explained to his brothers and sisters what had occurred between us in the den, I imagine eye rolls and chuckles.  And after all these years, I can still hear them laughing.   

My family is a working family—wise from life experiences—who separates education into two categories—street smarts and book smarts.  In the southern Italian-American family in particular, there has always existed a salient division between laborers and intellectuals, the corner boys and the college boys.  The corner boys were a tight-knit ghetto group, the kind of people you might see hanging out in front of the local deli, people like my grandfather, and my father.  Corner boys did not move out of their parents’ homes until they married.  They privileged family loyalty over socioeconomic mobility.  If they were to make money of any sort, it might come from gambling or charging kids a nickel to cross the street. 

College boys were immigrants who wanted to assimilate into American culture.  They rejected their families in order to rise above their stations.  College boys all but cast off their Italian roots to make better lives for themselves.  These were the Italians who attempted to challenge the stereotypes that defined them as members of a macho, uneducated, unruly lower class—people whose only role in life, it seemed, would be to work in shipyards, pizza joints, cobbler shops, or the mafia. 

The old-school Italians believed that too much education damaged a person’s moral fiber.  If a child was overly-involved in books and learning, he or she was not invested enough in family.  Besides, during early immigration, children were merely seen as assets: workers who could bring money into the household.  Educated children were seen as a threat—they might get too smart and leave the home, become something better than their parents. 

By 1930, only eleven percent of Italians who lived in New York had graduated from high school.  My Naples-born grandfather, who was twenty at the time, was part of that majority, had quit school in seventh grade to work at a shoe factory.  Overall, it seemed as if the first-generation Italian immigrants would forever be relegated to the working class, the life of the corner boy.  But their American-born children, like my father and his siblings, most of whom did, at least, graduate from high school, strived for more.  The Italian-Americans born after WWII were mainstreamed into the middle-class by programs such as the Montgomery G.I. Bill—the very program that funded my entire undergraduate degree.  If I had never joined the navy, higher education might have eluded me.           

            When I graduated from high school, my father asked, “Do you want to go to college?” 

I nodded, but had not seen myself as one of them, the college girls—the princesses from my Catholic high school with their cherry red convertibles and preppie clothes from the Limited.  Girls who, I imagined, had known since kindergarten that they would attend college and that their parents would pay. 

My father handed me a loan application to the local bank.  All the pages and questions and forms intimidated me.  I decided it would be easier and less frightening to keep my shift-manager position at the local McDonald’s.  I was following in the footsteps of every family member before me—the shoe-repairmen, the factory workers, the painters and roofers —foregoing the college experience to work as a laborer.  I knew of nothing else and thought making $4.25 an hour was a decent living. 

Less than a year later, after my twenty-one-year-old brother was killed in a motorcycle accident, and I realized that my life consisted of little more than work, partying and sleep, I came to new awareness.  Life had made me no promises, but there had to be more.  And if I wanted an education, I would have to work for it.  I enlisted in the United States Navy, not content any longer to be a corner girl.  Somehow, someway, I would get into college. 

One year after my discharge from the navy, where I had worked as a computer operator at a weather center in Monterey, California, I moved with my husband to his hometown in eastern Washington.  When the marriage ended, I enrolled full-time at community college.  I was a twenty-six-year-old divorcee and single mother of a two-year-old, on welfare (just as my father had once predicted when I was eighteen and hanging with the party crowd) who collected $600 a month from the Montgomery GI Bill: not necessarily the college girl you might see in a brochure, but nonetheless, a college girl. 

Every morning, I dropped my daughter off at daycare and sat in cozy classrooms crowded with students of all ages, desperate to better their lives.  I felt invigorated.  After classes, I finished my homework at the campus library, drove my daughter back to our two-bedroom trailer on the outskirts of town where I worked thirty hours a week as a grocery clerk.  At the time, I had no idea I would eventually earn a BA, an MA, and an MFA.  I only knew I was trying to make my life, and consequently the life of my daughter, better.  Going to college allowed me to spend more time with her, and gave me a goal—I wanted to become a writer while working as a professor of English.     

I am on a two-week visit to Binghamton with Eric, my husband of two years.  It’s 2003.  My father, bare-chested and sipping a Coors Light, sits in a folding chair before a 1000-piece puzzle in his den.  It is eleven in the morning. 

I stand beside the file cabinet in the left corner asking, “Which?” 

“The middle one,” my father says, pointing. 

I open the drawer to three plastic grocery bags, their tops tied into tight bows.  Each is labeled in black marker with the names of my siblings and me: Tony, Jack, Cindy.  I am pleased that my father is a pack-rat who never throws anything away.  He still has a paint-by-number portrait of a mouse holding a daisy that I painted for him when I was four. 

I lift my bag from the drawer and drag it into the living room where Eric watches the History Channel.  “I can’t wait to see what’s in here,” I say. 

The bag is lumpy and light.  I dump out a pile of letters from high school, my tassel from graduation in 1986, a stack of senior pictures.  There are notebooks and handouts from when I attended Apprenticeship school in the navy.  And when I dig closer to the bottom, I unearth my New York State standardized tests from 3^rd grade. 

I kneel in my father’s living room, the test results wrinkled in my hand.  I scan the categories, Reading, Math, Science, Social Studies, and see that I have scored above average in every subject.  For a few moments, I allow myself to be seduced by the lure of the standardized test.  Above average.  The very thing my family has never expected of me.  I have no recollection of ever having seen this test before, want to run into the den and ask my father, “What the hell?” 

But then I think: if my father would have told me then that I was above average, would I have tried harder?  Would I have stopped telling stories about my crazy stepmother on the playground and sat in a quiet corner to read?  Would I have studied on weekends instead of watching The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island?  Would I have read classic literature instead of Teen Beat and Mad?  Would I have preferred Mozart to the Rolling Stones?  To say yes seems idealistic.  Frankly, I adored being the class clown, welcomed the undivided attention of my peers as I stood on the playground imitating the voices and mannerisms of my teachers, shared anecdotes about my boisterous Italian family, told the latest joke from Playboy. 

But now I am a parent.  I know my daughters deserve better.  And I want more for them.  I am not content to see them merely “get by.”  I want to go against Italian tradition—I want them to be better than me.      

I am the first member of my family to attend college, the only member to have earned a graduate degree.  Often, when I visit my family back in New York I wonder what they think of me.  When we sit around the table in my grandmother’s kitchen lamenting about times past, talking about family gatherings, sharing gossip, I wonder how they see me.  Do they think that I think I am better than they are?  That I’m some kind of hotshot? 

When I am with my family, just as I resist regaining my east-coast accent, I resist the people I love, loathe what they discuss: which relative pissed off whom and why, which local retailer “screwed” one of them out of fifty cents, which client cheated one of my construction-worker uncles on his latest job.  Sometimes while they are talking I want to holler, “Thomas Hardy was an architect before he became a poet!” just to see the stunned looks on their faces. 

When I am with the Stilloes, I avoid talking about the things I know—literature, creative writing, philosophy—because I would hate to appear snooty, as if I were somehow “above” them, when I don’t feel that way at all.  And frankly, I doubt that any one of them would be impressed.  In the presence of family, I feel as if I am little more than the messy-haired girl who used to wipe boogers on the arm of Grandma’s good chair.  The gullible ninny whose older brother talked her into eating eggshells because he said they were more nutritious than the egg.  The troubled teen who fell in love with every hapless loser in Binghamton because she hadn’t yet realized she deserved better.  But what adult doesn’t feel like a kid in the presence of family?     

Every day I ask myself, corner girl or college girl?  I have the degrees, but cannot release the stranglehold my Italian family has on me.  If I called myself an “intellectual” in front of any of them, they would laugh me right out of my grandmother’s mint-green kitchen.  But am I being too hard on them?  I mean, maybe they are proud of my accomplishments but just can’t bring themselves to say it.  I feel as if I am both of them and against them.     

The last time I visited my father, we sat in his kitchen while he helped his girlfriend fill out a job application.  As I sipped coffee beside them, they repeatedly asked me how to spell certain words—punctual, diligent, astute.  I smiled and said, “Don’t you have a dictionary?”  But secretly, I was flattered.  My father rarely, if ever, allows himself to be vulnerable enough to ask me for help.  That gesture, small as it may seem, showed that he might think my education was worth something.  That I am more than a ciucio.  It also showed that I am still, after all these years, seeking his approval. 

When I mentioned the Italian proverb, Fesso chi fa I figli meglio di lui, to my father, he said, “You just described my father.  .  .  If I cooked something for him, he would take one taste and say, ‘I don’t like it.’  If I challenged his ideas, he would ask, ‘Who do you think you are?  Some kind of big shot?’  If we kids asked where he was going, he would say, ‘What are you? A cop?’  That’s just my father.”

Well, that’s my father, too.  Although I think he tries to be humble.  When I graduated with my Master of Fine Arts he sent a card with a check for $100.  Inside he had written: “I’m proud of you.  You make me happy.” 

In 1908, ten percent of the Italian-American kids who lived in New York City never bothered to attend school.  More than a third of those who did were labeled “academically retarded,” mostly because they did not speak English.  They also scored poorly on standardized tests and were labeled “disciplinary problems.”  If I lived during that time, would I have been part of the ten percent?  Or would I have been willing to sacrifice family to be a college girl?  Strip off the blue collar shirt.  Break the constraints of family in order to rise above her station. 

More than a year has passed since Josie tested for the GT program.  She seems to have forgotten about it.  Rarely mentions the day, the disappointment, her friends who get to leave the classroom to embark on adventures in science and math.  I watch her sit on the couch before school, reading Goosebumps or Judy Blume books, few cares weighing her down.  Her most recent standardized tests show above average scores in Reading and Language Usage, below-to-average scores in Math.  “I guess I’m just not good at math,” she says. 

            “That sounds like a cop out,” I say, smiling.  “You have to work at being good.”

Josie twirls her hair.

I often tell Josie and her older sister that they are in charge of their own lives; that when they grow up they can be whatever and whoever they want.  But who am I kidding?  If my children do not become more successful than I, I will feel as if I have done them a disservice. 

My children have always known me as a college student who worked part-time, part of two worlds.  And now that I have graduated, work forty hours a week as a receptionist, and write part-time, I wonder if this is who I am or who my family created: a woman in a liminal state—one foot in the “thinking” world and one in the “working” world, one half on each side, traveling back and forth when the need calls, these two worlds separated by a swinging door.    

---

Historical information from Richard Alba’s Italian-Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity.  Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1985.

Learning to Swim

Tony and I were excluded from everything that had to do with my father’s wedding to Vickie. It was the 70s after all, and I doubt it was very common to have leftover kids from marriage number one hanging around at the ceremony and reception of marriage number two. Or maybe it was just my family. Who knows? Tony and I were still in school for much of the planning, but for the actual weekend of the wedding, Vickie shuffled me off to her friend’s house, and Tony went to stay with his friend Robbie.

It’s all hazy to me now, the memories re-created through the numerous photos in the wedding album, which I would look at again and again over the years—the pictures of a freckle faced Vickie smiling and opening gifts at her bridal shower. The photo of my father in a white tuxedo, twenty-nine and drunk off his ass, who had forgotten to kiss Vickie at the altar, so dipped her as they were walking back down the aisle and planted one on her lips right through the veil.

It’s both surprising and not to think of my father being drunk for the wedding. According to the stories I remember hearing from Vickie, he had been drinking white wine all morning. In every photograph, his eyelids are at half-mast, he’s smiling, and looks absolutely adorable. Many years later, when I remarried at age 27 and had to guzzle two beers just to have enough courage to walk down the aisle, I wonder why I didn’t think of him and whether getting married for both of us was a huge mistake? Or did we just like to drink? Now that I know better, I think that if someone has to get drunk in order to get married, he or she might want to reflect on what's driving the decision.

There were other things I remembered hearing about or seeing in photos from the wedding weekend. For instance, even though a light snow fell that day, my uncle Ardine, Vietnam vet and alcoholic, stripped to just his tuxedo pants, climbed the locked gate of the in-ground pool at the hotel and leaped into the water. My father spilled white wine all over Vickie’s gown and several of the table cloths in the reception hall. The woman I stayed with scolded me for using the word “turd” when I wrote an impromptu song at her piano. “We don’t talk like that here,” she yelled. I never got the chance to see or talk to my brother the entire weekend, and remember nothing about getting back to our normal lives on Halford Street. For whatever reason, which I'll probably never know, Tony and I got lost in the wedding shuffle.

Summer was right around the corner. And since my father had married Vickie, Tony and I no longer went to the Day Camp at Woodrow Wilson. Vickie stayed home and we played with the neighborhood kids, or sometimes we went to her mother’s house. My and Tony’s long days at the shop were a distant memory. No more roaming through the plaza stealing hard candy from Britz, handfuls of peanuts from the Scotch n Sirloin, or coins from the fountains. We stayed with Vickie, and less and less often, saw our father.

One time Vickie took Tony and me swimming at her father’s apartment complex. I had only been “swimming” before at First Ward pool in my neighborhood, and had never left the shallow end. And since my only true experience had been part of day camp, I was always surrounded by capable counselors and lifeguards who could jump in if there was any trouble to save me.

Earlier in the week, Vickie had bought me a pink and white checkered bikini with a ruffle ringing the bottoms. I was excited to wear the swimsuit as Tony’s hand-me-downs had grown less appealing since Vickie moved in. I still liked to hang upside down from trees with my dresses on, much to her dismay, but I didn’t mind looking like a girl. She brushed through my hair, tied it up in ribbons, and traded my Chuck Taylors for Mary Janes. On the drive over to the apartment complex, Vickie said, “Today, I’m teaching you how to swim,” which made me shiver. Something about the tone of her voice sounded sinister, as though I had no choice in the matter.

When we arrived at the pool, an in-ground rectangle surrounded by a concrete deck and chain link fence, I gaped at the sky-scraping pine trees that formed a larger rectangle outside the fence. There were already several people lying out on the deck, hirsute men with gold chains wearing black Speedos, and skinny women wearing crocheted bikinis and gold lamé. Vickie, Tony, and I walked past everyone to get to her father’s apartment because we needed him to give us a key to open the gate. Since we didn’t live at the complex, we weren’t really supposed to swim in the pool. But as I would learn, Vickie was never someone who had a lot of respect for rules.

Vickie’s father Norman answered the door and let us in. His girlfriend, Robin, a diminutive and voluptuous brunette, walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her pubic hair showing itself from the bottom. I tried not to look, but was only six and couldn’t help it. When I glanced away, I caught sight of the skin mags—Playboy and Hustler—my step-grandfather kept on the coffee table. This was no big deal to me as my father had the same magazines at our house. Saturday mornings while watching cartoons, I pored over the pages of Hustler, addicted to, yet confused by the warm tingling between my legs that I felt when looking at photos of men and women soaping each other in the shower, lying on beds with zebra print sheets, or tickling each other with hay in abandoned barns.

After Robin got into her swimsuit, she, Tony, Vickie, and I walked down the stairs and out to the pool. My hands were shaking as I unfolded my towel and rested it on the lounge chair beside Robin, hoping that if I avoided Vickie she would forget all about “teaching” me how to swim.

I lay back and look up, the sun shining through the rectangle formed by the tops of the pine trees. Tony took the lounge chair on the other side of me, and Vickie next to him. She wore a purple bikini and slathered baby oil all over her legs, arms, and stomach. Her skin was fish belly white with freckles and I had seen her come home red as a cooked crab before, but was too young to know that the baby oil was for cooking, not tanning. Vickie often covered a cardboard slat in tin foil, then made a cut out for her neck. While lying in the back yard, she held that tin foil slat beneath her chin and lay in the sun. She only got more freckles.

Tony and Vickie jumped into the pool. I lay frozen on the lounge chair, my long brown hair making sweat on my forehead and back of my neck. The air was stifling. Vickie called for me to come in, so I shuffled to the stairs and stood in the water only as deep as my belly button. The ruffles of my bikini bottom floated and I twisted back and forth, watching the pink and white checks sway in the water. I did this for quite some time, before Vickie swam over to me and rested her forearms, underside up, on the surface of the water. “Get on,” she said.

I shook my head and mumbled, “I don’t want to.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she snapped. “Come on.”

“But I don’t want to.” Tears welled in my eyes and I felt like I had a rock in my stomach.

She pulled me onto her forearms and said, “Do it, or I’ll never bring you here again.” I was about to say that was fine, but my brother was shaking his head and giving me the "stink eye" from the deep end.

“Now,” Vickie said, “paddle your arms and kick your legs.” I was suddenly aware of all of the eyes on me. I was not going to let Vickie win. I slapped my arms against the surface of the water in an attempt to soak her. Then, like a crazy person, I started to scream and kick my legs.

“Goddamn-it,” she yelled, “knock that off.” I kept screaming, pounding and kicking the water. I wanted to embarrass her. Make her look like a wicked witch who was abusing someone else’s kid. “If you don’t stop it,” she said, “I’ll take you into that apartment and give you something to cry about.” What this meant, of course, was that she would whip me with a belt or whatever else might be handy. I thought about Norman’s apartment and what weapons might be there that I had not noticed. I hollered, “I don’t want to do this!”

Vickie pushed me off her arms and dove underwater, swimming to the other end of the pool. My face burned with shame in the presence of all of those sunbathers. I climbed the stairs out of the pool and took my seat next to Tony. Robin lay next to me, wearing a giant sunhat. Her full lips and earthy good looks reminded me of Carly Simon.

“Why do you always have to make a scene?” my brother asked. His light brown hair hung to his shoulders. His eyes were bright green and squinting against the sun.

“She’s mean,” I said. “That’s why.”

Vickie slowly ascended the ladder at the pool’s deep end. She walked past the three men who were sunbathing, and each watched her ass. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but as I would come of age, this kind of attention she got angered me enormously. I was pretty sure that my father wouldn’t have appreciated those salacious looks.

I had wrapped myself in a towel, determined not to step foot into the water for the rest of the day, perhaps for the rest of my life. My skin was like goose-flesh. Vickie sat beside my brother. Her blond hair was slicked back off her face. She sat straight up and started again to coat herself in baby oil. “You’re going to fry yourself,” Robin said.

“Yeah,” Vickie answered, “but it’ll turn to a tan.”

Tony turned to me and said, “Come in the pool with me.”

I shook my head.

“Go on,” Vickie said, “quit being such a baby.”

I reluctantly followed my brother over to the stairs. He leapt into the deep end and swam back and forth, as though taunting me. It was him and Vickie against me that day, and I was losing. I walked down to watch him swim in the deep end. The concrete deck burned the soles of my feet.

“Get in there,” Vickie called. I pretended not to hear, looked across the way to the young men lying in lounge chairs, grown ups without anyone telling them what to do. I couldn’t wait to be an adult.

Without warning, Vickie sneaked up behind me, lifted me by the forearms and dropped me into the deep end. I had no time to prepare. The last thing I saw was the dropped open mouths of the people on the deck. And just like in a cartoon, I threw my open hand into the air as a plead for someone to save me. Then the scene went dark.

To this day, I have no recollection as to what happened next. Did my brother pull me from the water? Did Vickie? Or was it one of the hirsute strangers that had watched Vickie’s ass? Looking back, I like to think that no one leapt in to save me. Instead, I imagine my small body in a fit of paddling and kicking rising to the surface. I like to think that I was able to stay afloat in order to catch a couple breaths of air. Then I turned toward the ladder, and in my most humiliating impersonation of the dog paddle, swam to the side. This would be a defining moment in my life, one of the very first times I would be forced to save myself.